Blogged

September 03, 2008

Update 2: Palin, Pregnancy, and Political Theater

by Deb Cupples| Tthe blogosphere has been in a frenzy over John McCain's choosing Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. McCain made the announcement on his birthday, four days ago -- which was the day after the Democratic National Convention ended. Given the recent media fixation on Palin, it seems that Operation Thunder Theft is a success.

Some people view Palin as McCain's attempt to appeal to former Hillary supporters: specifically, the female ones, whom the media have blanketly decided are iffy about Sen. Obama only because they're bitter feminists (males who haven't yet embraced Obama are labeled racists).

I can't see throngs of feminist-leaning Hillary supporters flocking to an openly anti-abortion candidate like Palin. As Newshoggers' Ron Beasley pointed out, Palin is the "anti-Hillary."

I also have trouble believing that any politically astute Republican strategist would make such a miscalculation -- especially in a way that made the candidate appear moronic enough to think all women are interchangeable.

Admittedly, one never knows.

Yesterday, the media and blogosphere were atwitter over news that Gov. Palin's 17-year-old (unmarried) daughter is five months' pregnant. According to Reuters, Gov. Palin publicly acknowledged the pregnancy in order to "knock down
rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy
to cover up for her child."

I wonder where the faked-pregnancy idea came from. Obviously, I haven't been following the Palin stories very closely.

Incidentally, a Time Magazine reporter said that the pregnancy was common knowledge among gossipy townsfolk.

ABC News reported that Palin was, back in the mid-1990s, part of a "fringe" political group -- some of whose members wanted Alaska to be an independent nation.

The Christian Broadcast Network reported that Gov. Palin's husband had been arrested for DUI -- back in 1986, when he was 22.

It's all out-of-this-world mortifying: a twenty-something kid getting behind the wheel after too many brewskies; a thirty-something woman joining a non-mainstream but non-violent group (14 years ago); and a 17-year-old girl having sex out of wedlock -- apparently during a poorly timed contraceptive failure.

It's all as shocking as the gambling that was going on at Rick's in Casablanca.

On top of that, there are allegations that Gov. Palin used her position to harass a state trooper who'd been married to her sister; that Gov. Palin is snuggly in bed with Big Oil; and that she had approved of Sen. Ted Stevens' millions in questionable earmarks for a bridge that essentially went nowhere.

ABC's George Stephanopoulos said that given the (truly shocking) stuff that's come out since Palin was announced as McCain's choice, "there's no way" the GOP had fully vetted her. Stephanopoulos earnestly asked, "What else don't we know about Governor Palin"?

Citing Stephanopoulos, TPM's Josh Marshall said that McCain's campaign has "sent a team of GOP lawyers up to Alaska to do what I guess you'd call a post-vetting of Sarah Palin." Marshall concludes: "John McCain didn't do any serious vetting of Palin before he invited her to join his ticket."

Maybe McCain's staff didn't vet Palin. Maybe his highly paid strategists never did bother to spend a day on the Internets, microfiche, or telephone in search of dirt on Gov. Palin.

Though GOP operatives typically excel at research, I suppose it's possible that they were completely comatose regarding the Palin issue.

Then again, maybe the McCain campaign is playing the public -- like ad execs and politicians have habitually done for years. Maybe McCain had no intention of actually finishing the race with Palin as his partner.

It does seem odd that typically lock-step Republicans began publicly criticizing Gov. Palin the day she was chosen. A former Bush speech writer, for example, wrote that Palin's experience is even less impressive than Obama's (and we know how loyal Republicans feel about Obama's lack of experience).

Perhaps McCain's strategists had just wanted to show that McCain is willing to choose a woman -- while drawing media attention away from the Democrats' convention (again, mission accomplished).

Any GOP researcher worth his salt likely could have intuited -- without doing any research at all -- that Gov. Palin had (at some point) used her political position to punish some personal enemies and cozied up to various industries at the public's expense. That's what most GOP politicians do.

Even a lazy GOP researcher, given that fundamental knowledge of his own party's politicians, could have vetted Gov. Palin pretty quickly. And yet, despite the high stakes in this race, every member of McCain's team failed to spot the nuggets about Palin before the pundits did?

Here's another possible benefit of such a twisted scheme: if Gov. Palin withdraws form the race, McCain's campaign can easily paint opponents as terribly callous, win-at-any-cost sharks who fed upon one of the thousands of teenage American girls who aren't proficient with modern contraceptive technology.

Or maybe McCain wanted a running mate whose family is not Rockwell-perfect. That certainly would make him seem open-minded and understanding: a woman whom chivalrous men and empathetic women would rally round when the opposition attacks began.

There are many maybes. With my mind-reading skills vacationing in Madrid, I don't actually know what happened or what motivated McCain's team.

What I do know is that most politicians are far from above using dramatic political theater to manipulate the media and public.

"Here’s the deal: Palin is the latest G.O.P. distraction. She’s meant to
shift attention away from the real issue of this campaign — the awful
state of the nation after eight years of Republican rule. The
Republicans are brilliant at distractions. Willie Horton was a
distraction. The chatter about gays, guns and God has been a
long-running distraction. And we all remember the Swift-boat campaign.

"If you want a real issue, forget all of the above and revisit Monday’s
front page of The New York Times. Hundreds of families are being forced
out of their homes each month in Louisville, Ky., because of mortgage
foreclosures. With record numbers of poor and homeless students, the
public schools are struggling...."

That doesn't sound left field-ish to me. And what better way to create a distraction than by picking a running mate with a bit of a history.

Remember, Obama's running mate has some red flags in his history, too. And every time Obama supporters go after Palin (assuming she's meant to stay in the race), it'll be that much easier to go after Biden without looking like an instigating mud-slinger.

Update 2: Today's Washington Post reports that Palin was not personally interviewed until the day before McCain selected her as his running mate -- however, she was on the original list of 20 for months (certainly enough time for a background check):

"McCain advisers said they had gathered extensive information about
Palin before that meeting, including details of an ongoing
investigation in Alaska involving her firing of the state's public
safety commissioner. Details of her life and her record as governor
that have since emerged in media accounts were discovered during that
process, they said...."

"McCain officials said that questionnaire and the personal interview
revealed three new facts previously unknown to the team: Palin's
daughter's pregnancy, the arrest of her husband two decades ago for
driving while intoxicated, and a fine Palin paid for fishing without
proper identification.... [Notice how easy to overlook the 20-year-old DUI and the fishing fine are]

"'We made a political determination that the American people would not
object to a female candidate with a 17-year-old daughter who was
pregnant,' Schmidt said Tuesday. 'We believed that parents all over
America would understand that life happens. The team made a
recommendation to the senator that these issues were not disqualifying.'"

Yes, that could happen to anyone who has teenage girls. And I can imagine the sentiments that McCains campaign strategists might have sought to evoke.

Things like: how cool that it happened to an actual state governor -- maybe she really is a mere mortal like the rest of us -- and how dare those political operatives try to beat her up over that (or the fishing license, or her husband's 20-year-old DUI).

Of course, we're assuming that McCain's campaign staff was candid with the Washington Post.

You haven't missed much if you weren't following pregnancy-coverup-gate. Times like this serve as a reminder that there are idiots and rumor-mongerers on both sides of the political spectrum.

Bristol Palin's pregnancy is obviously off-limits from a political perspective. There's no hipocricy here, just another example, among millions, of where Sarah Palin's proposed "abstinence only" sex-ed gets you.

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If McCain had nominated someone like Olympia Snowe, that would have been a real, legitimate play at Hillary supporters. Any other pro-choice female Republican with significant experience would have fit the bill. But not Palin. I can't imagine this selection will convert a significant number of Hillary supporters who were actually on the fence.

There's plenty of POSSIBLE benefits for McCain from the Palin pick, but I think the simplest and most likely explanation for a pick with so many drawbacks is that she was an impulsive, ill-considered pick.

How are you? Can't wait for another of your well-written posts (NO pressure, though).

We agree that Palin is the anti-Hillary and that "abstinence only" is bad strategy.

I wouldn't say, however, that Bristol's pregnancy has practically speaking) been "off limits," because a lot of people have been screaming about it. That's to be expected, given our medias' thirst for such nonsense.

Interesting that you bring up Snowe: she's whom I thought McCain would beg to join his ticket.

Again, you're right: the "simplest" explanation is a total ball dropping by McCain's strategists and staff on one of his most important decisions.

I can't prove anything, but I just don't buy it.

If journalists do their job (or come across a leak), we might find out the truth eventually.

Certainly the media IS talking about Briston Palin, just as they talk about whatever other tabloid nonsense they want to talk about. But I don't consider the subject either politically advantageous to Democrats, or appropriate for intense scrutiny. She's 17 and made a mistake. Dog bites man.

If McCain had picked Snowe that would have scared me a lot. That would be a real game changer. He would have basically been calling the religious right's bluff - the worst thing they could do is stay home, and most of them probably wouldn't do that. Meanwhile, Snowe is the true moderate/maverick that McCain claims he is, and she reinforces the experience argument. That's two things Palin doesn't do.

One "scoop" I read today - and who knows if it is true - is that McCain wanted to pick Ridge or Lieberman. Rove nixed a pro-choice pick and was pushing Romney, so McCain went with Palin essentially to assert his independence from the Rovians.

Third, Obama's "off limits" talking points were BS. All Obama can do is fire staff for (getting caught at) bringing up the pregnancy -- and he could have addressed staff PRIVATELY.

His public address was just an attempt to get points. And for all we know, he wasn't sincere. Remember when he told the debate audience that Hillary's Bosnia lie was no issue to him -- then a few days later HIS STAFFERS were talking to the press about it?

Me, I'm just getting tired of the political theater. I think Obama will win. I'm ready for November to come and go.

There's no equivalence between Obama's statements on Hillary's Bosnia story, and Obama's statements on Bristol Palin's pregnancy. In the first case, he said something along the lines of "it's one of those things that happens on the campaign, and I don't feel the need to harp on it here". In the second case, he basically said "it's off-limits and I will fire any staff that bring it up". There's a difference between minimizing an issue, and saying an issue is absolutely verboten.

That said, of course you're right that he said it publicly for political reasons. More precisely, he was trying to distance himself from the story so that the Republicans would focus their blowback on the media as oppose to on the Obama campaign. But there's no reason, even accounting for past incidents in the primary, to think that Obama is being insincere here, or that he would fail to follow through and fire staffers over this issue.

I agree that Palin deserves criticism for her policies on abstinence education and early childhood care. But the fact that these issues hit home for Palin doesn't really make her a hypocrite or anything. If she was one of those firebrands railing against the collapse of family values, then sure, the desire to set aside indiscretions in her own family would show hypocrisy.

Given how many times I've seen solid evidence of insincerity, I just assume that Obama is not sincere until proven otherwise.

That's HIS fault, not mine: he is the keeper of his own credibility.

I'm still voting for Obama, though, because I think he's a slightly safer dice roll than the new McCain.

You're right. In my other post, I didn't really label Palin a hypocrite -- just a personally irresponsible policy maker who is more interested in adopting the pro-life label than in actually nurturing life.